ERIC ZUESSE -- Indictments Likely by Sep. 4th Against Former Obama Administration Officials

 

Indictments Likely by Sep. 4th Against Former Obama Administration Officials

 

Eric Zuesse – August 11, 2020

 

Here is why federal criminal indictments of former Obama Administration officials are likely before September 4th:

 

As I have previously documented, the case is overwhelming that extremely serious crimes were, in fact, committed and covered-up, and the only real question now is how high up in the Administration they went — possibly up to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but that’s the big question.

 

(I need to state here, for the record, that I voted for Barack Obama both times, though recognized in 2012 that he was the lesser of two evils — I am not, and never have been, a Republican.)

 

The George W. Bush Administration established the precedent that there is a “60-day rule” that any indictment of a person who is associated with a U.S. Presidential election that is to occur within the following 60 days is to be avoided. It’s not a law, but it is — and ever since Bush’s Presidency has been — the custom; and the current U.S. Attorney General, Bill Barr, has reiterated it. Consequently, if there will be any indictments, then Barr would need to be an idiot to bring them after that time.

 

Any reader here who wants to know, in a general sense, what the crimes were, can find that at my previous presentation.

 

There is considerable speculation, in Republican circles, regarding how high up those crimes went. (See this and this.) For over a year now, there has also been considerable propaganda from participants in the cover-ups — mainly Democrats — aimed at preparing the public for such indictments (if they happen) by prejudicing the public to believe that (even if the 60-day rule will be adhered to) the public should view the indictments only as being political retribution for Democrats having impeached and tried to remove Trump. (See this, for a recent example of that Democratic Party propaganda.)

 

Here will be the currently existing public record of the relevant facts regarding how high up this operation actually went:

 

On 15 February 2018, Andrew C. McCarthy headlined at the Republican Party’s National Review magazine, "What Did Comey Tell President Trump about the Steele Dossier?” and he wrote about what had happened on 5 and 6 January 2017, right before Trump became President:

 

January 5 was the day President Obama was presented with the ballyhooed report he had ordered to be rushed to completion by multiple intelligence agencies before his administration ended, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.”  [This report, from the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was to serve as the basis for impeaching Trump and removing Trump from the Presidency, thus making the more reliably neoconservative V.P., Mike Pence, the U.S. President, which many billionaires wanted. All of America’s 700 or so billionaires are neoconservatives, in both Parties, no exceptions — none has more than token-donated to any anti-neoconservative national candidate. Pence is regarded as more-reliably neoconservative than Trump is.] The briefing that day was conducted by four intelligence-community leaders: James Comey, Michael Rogers, John Brennan, and James Clapper, directors respectively of the FBI, NSA, CIA and the Office of the National Intelligence Director.

Just as significant: January 5 was the day before these same intelligence-community leaders would brief President-elect Trump on the same report. [McCarthy had earlier said that “January 5 was the day President Obama was presented with” this report, so he contradicts himself there. January 5 actually was the day of, and not “the day before.”]

Also on hand at the January 5 White House briefing were Vice President Joe Biden and acting Attorney General Sally Yates. According to Rice, immediately after the briefing, President Obama had his two top law-enforcement officials, Yates and Comey, linger for “a brief follow-on conversation” with the administration’s political leadership: Obama, Biden, and Rice.

 

At the top level, Obama, Biden, and Rice, were the core team, and Obama was himself the leader; but Obama — as is usual in such instances — left nothing in writing to implicate himself: unrecorded private conversations would have been all. And Trump’s team will need to plea-bargain with subordinates in order to have any chance to nail any of those three: the mastermind (Obama), and his two top aides in the scheme.

 

As the Republican Paul Sperry, an investigative journalist for Real Clear Politics, noted on 22 July 2019, under the headline “Justice Dept. Watchdog Has Evidence Comey Probed Trump, on the Sly”, “Following a report on alleged Russian election interference, Comey cleared the conference room to privately brief Trump on the Clinton campaign-funded Steele dossier itself — without disclosing its source. He referred to the political document simply as ‘the derogatory files’. … Comey also withheld the facts that the dossier was financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign. … The omissions led Trump to believe the contents of the dossier came from U.S. intelligence.” (NOTE: Trump, who pretends to be intelligent, skeptical, analytical, and knowledgeable, is anything but those; so, he foolishly trusted Obama’s team, and didn’t ask the probing questions he should have asked of Comey.)

 

Columnist Kimberly Strassel headlined in the Republican Party’s Wall Street Journal on 25 July 2019, “What Mueller Was Trying to Hide”, and excerpts from it were published by the White House, including: “The most notable aspect of the Mueller report was always what it omitted: the origins of this mess. … Nine times during Wednesday’s hearing, Robert Mueller answered that something was not in his ‘purview' to investigate. And each time, it was ‘in response to questions about the origin story of the FBI counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign,’ The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes. ‘Americans need to know how and why a U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agency came to spy on a presidential campaign.’”

 

On 2 May 2020, National Review magazine’s Andrew C. McCarthy headlined “The FBI Set Flynn Up to Preserve the Trump–Russia Probe”, and he wrote:

 

To investigate the president, it was a practical necessity to sideline his chosen national-security adviser.

Michael Flynn was not the objective. He was the obstacle.

Once you grasp that fundamental fact, it becomes easier to understand the latest disclosures the Justice Department made in the Flynn case on Thursday. They are the most important revelations to date about the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation, code-named Crossfire Hurricane.

The new disclosures, in conjunction with all we have learned in the last week, answer the all-important why question: Why was Flynn set up? …

The FBI set a perjury trap for Flynn, hoping to lure him into misstatements that the bureau could portray as lies. In the frenzied political climate of the time, that would have been enough to get him removed from his new position as national security adviser (NSA), perhaps even to prosecute him. On that score, the new disclosures, startling as they are to read, just elucidate what was already obvious.

But why did they do it? That has been the baffling question. …

The objective of the Obama administration and its FBI hierarchy was to continue the Trump–Russia investigation, even after President Trump took office, and even though President Trump was the quarry. The investigation … would allow the FBI to keep digging until it finally came up with a crime or impeachable offense that they were then confident they would find. Remember, even then, the bureau was telling the FISA court that Trump’s campaign was suspected of collaborating in Russia’s election interference. FBI brass had also pushed for the intelligence community to include the Steele dossier — the bogus compendium of Trump–Russia collusion allegations — in its report assessing Russia’s meddling in the campaign.

But how could the FBI sustain an investigation targeting the president when the president would have the power to shut the investigation down?

The only way the bureau could pull that off would be to conceal from the president the fullness of the Russia investigation — in particular, the fact that Trump was the target.

That is why Flynn had to go. …

 

On 24 June 2020, Britain’s Daily Mail bannered “Unsealed documents suggest Joe Biden ‘personally raised the idea’ of investigating Michael Flynn over his ties to Russia” and reported that not only did the available written evidence indicate that Biden had been the first person to propose this to FBI Director Comey on 4 January 2017, but that Biden actually proposed that the (archaic and unused) Logan Act be used as the legal basis to do so — which was the basis that the FBI did subsequently cite (this being the first-ever usage of that 1799 law); so, both the idea of getting rid of Flynn, and the legal means to do it, were supplied by Biden, and Comey followed through to get rid of Flynn. In other words: it was Biden’s staff that had researched to find a legal way to do this. “That became an admitted pretext to investigate General Flynn.” Biden was a principal in this operation; he was a founder of the FBI’s operation “Crossfire Hurricane.”

 

There is a war-to-the-death among crocodiles at the top, the political executors for (actually employees of) America’s aristocracy — both the Democratic Party’s billionaires and the Republican Party’s billionaires — in order to determine which of these two groups of billionaires will control the U.S. Government. For example, when two kings fight to conquer each other, it’s their subordinates who head the actual killing and dying, and the pawns below them just fall: they die or else become crippled trying to destroy the other king’s troops and population. Right now, it’s between the Trump forces versus the Obama forces, but the same aristocracy controls them both. 

 

These crocodiles have billionaires backing them, and therefore are protected at beck-and-call by vast teams of lawyers, propagandists, and other paid agents, to protect them. They’re well-protected.

 

Whereas the Republican Party is trying to pretend that the U.S. Government’s domestic secret police force, the FBI (Comey, etc.), were the leaders here, and that the CIA (Brennan, etc.) — the U.S. aristocracy’s international subversion force, which traditionally handles coups — was only cooperating, they were actually working hand-in-hand, and UK’s MI6 was deeply involved along with America’s CIA. This work for the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex (specifically serving the top sellers to the Pentagon) explains, for example, why the FBI Director, James Comey’s, main lifetime paymaster was not the U.S. federal Government, but Lockheed Martin Corporation — which receives over 8% of all dollars paid to all contractors of the U.S. Government, and on top of that additional billions annually from U.S.-allied Governments such as the Saud family, and he also received heavily from Lockheed’s second-biggest stockholder, Bridgewater Associates. 

 

James Clapper is now an employee of the Center for a New American Security, which is funded by Northrup Grumman and other funders of the American Military-Industrial Complex, all of them neoconservative (i.e., pro-imperialism) foundations and war-related corporations, such as the Smith-Richardson Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, James Murdoch, and Raytheon. CNAS was co-founded by Michèle Flournoy, who would likely have become a President Hillary Clinton’s Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense. Flournoy is now an employee of Harvard’s rabidly pro-invasion Belfer Center. All of these people represent the same thing: America’s billionaires — no one else.

 

John Brennan in retirement “serves as a Distinguished Fellow at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, a Distinguished Scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, a Senior Advisor at Kissinger Associates Inc, and a consultant to a variety of [unnamed] private sector companies.” 

 

On 25 October 2019, Lee Fang at The Intercept headlined “JOE BIDEN’S SUPER PAC IS BEING ORGANIZED BY CORPORATE LOBBYISTS FOR HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY, WEAPONS MAKERS, FINANCE”, and he reported that among the billionaires who were planning a PAC to support Biden’s campaign was Bernard Schwartz. On that same day, I headlined "Biden Backer — Former Lockheed Leader — Convinces Biden to Sell-Out”, and I reported that the “Former Lockheed leader” who was leading this effort was Schwartz, himself, formerly a Chairman of Lockheed Martin, the company that sells more to the U.S. Government than does any other — it’s by far the largest federal contractor. 

 

In other words: if Biden does become the U.S. President, then he will be heavily in debt to the world’s biggest weapons-maker, a corporation whose profits are totally dependent upon selling to the U.S. Government and to its allied governments such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Israel.

 

Biden received donations from 66 U.S. billionaires — more than any other candidate in the Democratic Presidential primaries. On 16 April 2019, the New York Times had headlined “‘Stop Sanders’ Democrats Are Agonizing Over His Momentum”, and reported that, “The discussion about Mr. Sanders has to date been largely confined to private settings because — like establishment Republicans in 2016 — Democrats are uneasy about elevating him or alienating his supporters. The matter of What To Do About Bernie and the larger imperative of party unity has, for example, hovered over a series of previously undisclosed Democratic dinners in New York and Washington organized by the longtime party financier Bernard Schwartz.”

 

For unstated reasons, Republican billionaires have thus far targeted only Comey, not Clapper or Brennan — only the FBI. If Barr will likewise protect Clapper and Brennan, his “investigation” will fail.

 

The billionaires want to have a monopoly on conspiracies, and therefore they pretend that only kooks think that conspiracies exist, but there is no credible way that an individual atop an organization can run a crime except by secretly instructing his subordinates, who secretly instruct their subordinates, and on down. And most conspiracies are not at all criminal, but are instead private corporations’ private business plans; so, there’s nothing unusual about conspiracies. Keeping the public thinking that conspiracies either don’t exist, or exist amongst unorganized masses of people instead of headed by a “mastermind,” or else that they all are illegal, are just ways of deceiving the public in order to keep the public under control by keeping them ignorant and confused — it’s part of the worst type of conspiracy that exists, which is conspiracies against the public. Unfortunately, conspiracies like that exist always.

 

There inevitably are pressures upon all investigators for each side, deterring them from publicly disclosing, or helping to disclose, anything that would endanger any of the actual principals, who are billionaires. The principals in this specific operation (which the FBI called “Crossfire Hurricane” but was actually initiated in the CIA by no later than August 2016, if not by the DNI Clapper, if not by the President himself — and certainly Obama was aware of it by no later than August 2016) will go down before any of his financial sponsors will. So, the question now is: how high is this investigation actually reaching?

 

The retired Republican CIA intelligence-analyst Larry C. Johnson headlined on 6 May 2019, “Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well”, and alleged that:

 

The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence [James Clapper], worked with British counterparts [in MI6] starting in the summer of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. [CIA Director] John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives, the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie Sanders.

 

Johnson (who writes badly) failed to identify his source on that “summer of 2015,” much less the precise date and incident. He routinely quotes sources without citing them. However, if what Johnson said there is true, then certainly whether Brennan was authorized to do that must be determined. Was it Obama?

 

Barr’s team would have to be incompetent not to be taking a deposition, under oath, from Brennan, as to whether or not he had the President’s authorization to be spying domestically against Republican candidates and against Bernie Sanders. Furthermore, the CIA’s usage of MI6 to carry out the CIA’s spying against American citizens that the CIA is targeting in the U.S., should be outlawed, because it’s yet further proof that America is a police-state. (MI6 does the same: uses the CIA to spy against UK citizens in UK. Both countries are police-states.) 

 

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.